I'm very excited about our new work which aims to model causes and effects on stories online! Narratives and stories are everywhere, so it's helpful to be able to understand how people use them in nuanced ways.

The next edition of the NLP+CSS will be at ACL 2026! It includes an open-ended shared task (work with the Opioid Industry Documents Archive) with travel grants as prizes!

WE HAVE A BYTE MODEL THAT DOESN'T SUCK

We‘ve seen huge improvements thanks to improvements in scaling and data curation, which admittedly were hard to build scientific careers on. But there’s been no revolutionary shift in methodology since the victory of neural machine translation with attention over ngram models ~2015.

LLMs didn’t move language modeling research from linguists to AI people, they just moved it from computer scientists who thought language was interesting to computer scientists who thought language was boring

Excited to get this work out in the world at #chr2025 (with Sabrina Baur, Mackenzie Cramer, Anna Ho and Tom McEnaney) -- asking: how much do contemporary songs tell stories, and how has that changed over the past half century? anthology.ach.org/volumes/vol0...

the original masking objective, or: filling in the black d•t in EEBO-TCP transcriptions, presented at #CHR2025 by Kiara M.H. Liu, Martin Mueller and @mattwilkens.bsky.social

From #CHR2025, I am happy to make public the update of #CoMMA, our corpus of multilingual medieval manuscripts, ran through our ATR pipeline. We updated our corpus with 10k manuscripts, reaching: 2.7B tokens in Latin 560M in French comma.inria.fr But that's not the only thing we did...

Another awesome project, "Print & Probability: Using AI to Identify Printers of Clandestine Letterpress Books." Congrats to chrisvvarren.bsky.social & Taylor Berg-Kirkpatrick!

For "Beyond Translation: Opening up the Human Record", congrats to PIs: Greg Crane (Tufts) & @dasmiq.bsky.social (Northeastern).

Which canonical American authors are the public reading, and why? To find out, we analyzed library borrowing patterns for every author in the Norton Anthology of American Literature (1945 to the Present). Excited to share this new CHR paper & data! anthology.ach.org/volumes/vol0... #CHR2025

Excited to be in Luxembourg at CHR 2025 to hear about everyone’s amazing work and to share my project with @mellymeldubs.bsky.social and our team. We tracked canonical authors and texts in Seattle Public Library circulation data.

🧑‍🔬I’m recruiting PhD students in Natural Language Processing @unileipzig.bsky.social Computer Science, together with @scadsai.bsky.social! Topics include, but aren’t limited to: 🔎Linguistic Interpretability 🌍Multilingual Evaluation 📖Computational Typology Please share! #NLProc #NLP

Also, our team is hiring an AI Research Scientist! www.usajobs.gov/job/851528400

“Beyond Translation: Opening up the Human Record” is among the HAVI projects awarded by @schmidtsciences.bsky.social. Congratulations to PIs @philologistgrc.bsky.social and @dasmiq.bsky.social!

I am beyond thrilled to share some good news: 1. I've moved to a new job at UC Santa Barbara. 2. We have been selected for a 2025 Humanities and AI Virtual Institute award from @schmidtsciences.bsky.social! Both, we hope, will allow us to continue building the work! + hfa.ucsb.edu/news/schmidt...

Excited to present my work with @emilyue.bsky.social at #CHR2025 tomorrow at 3pm! If you're around, please join us. Our full paper is available at: doi.org/10.63744/uNU.... We fine-tuned a BERT model on medieval Chinese poetry to study Shipin, a sixth-century Chinese work of literary criticism. 1/5

At the #Neurips2025 mechanistic interpretability workshop I gave a brief talk about Venetian glassmaking, since I think we face a similar moment in AI research today. Here is a blog post summarizing the talk: davidbau.com/archives/202...

Delighted to share that my co-PIs @danielwilson.bsky.social @mcollardanuy.bsky.social and Kaspar Beelen have been selected for a 2025 Humanities and AI Virtual Institute award from @schmidtsciences.bsky.social: www.schmidtsciences.org/humanities-a...

Big congrats to these 23 projects that just won awards from the @schmidtsciences.bsky.social HAVI program! Please spread the word. (NB I've been helping the HAVI team on this program. This is a broad slate of terrific DH projects!) www.schmidtsciences.org/havi-2025-an...

I gave a new talk on AI, cultural hegemony and the importance of the digital survival of "small" languages online this past Tuesday at University of Copenhagen. Notes and partial slides now online: ethanzuckerman.com/2025/12/05/g...

COMPREHENSIVE and excellent set of slides here - explaining why WoS and Scopus are no longer fit for purpose, describing the changing nature of publishing globally. Relevant for OJS work and diamond OA as well. From @juancommander.scholcommlab.ca scholarworks.uni.edu/cgi/viewcont...

Accidental bibliography achievement unlocked! (I highly recommend checking out both papers)

Our #NeurIPS2025 paper shows that even comparable monolingual tokenizers have different compression rates across languages. But by getting rid of whitespace tokenization and using a custom vocab size for each language, we can reduce token premiums. Preprint out now!

My colleagues are running an open reading group on manuscripts if anyone is interested. openiti.org/2025/10/27/F...

I added a new post on my research blog last week. I wanted to react to a post from Dan Cohen that I've seen circulating on BlueSky last week about Gemini 3, and figured I would add my critical 2 cents to the mix! alix-tz.github.io/phd/posts/025/

📢 Postdoc position 📢 I’m recruiting a postdoc for my lab at NYU! Topics include LM reasoning, creativity, limitations of scaling, AI for science, & more! Apply by Feb 1. (Different from NYU Faculty Fellows, which are also great but less connected to my lab.) Link in 🧵

"The heroic excavators of government secrets" - Author Stephen Kinzer on 40 years of the National Security Archive @nsarchive.bsky.social www.bostonglobe.com/2025/12/01/o...

I'll be at #NeurIPS2025 from Tues-Sat! Come say hi 👋 if you wanna chat about 🦈 olmo 3 stories 🐟 pretraining data & evals 🍣 midtraining shouldnt exist 🐠 model specialization 🐡 AI for education 🍥 tabletop games

More oral traditions today.

I’m fascinated by all the variations folks are reporting in this thread It’s one of those things that feels like "well of course these are the lyrics" until you realize there were *so many* variations

I have now tested this with Claude 4.5 Opus and it's as good as Gemini 3 Pro, nearly perfect transcriptions. And I've gotten a lot of email that they also work well on non-English-language transcriptions & have heard from some libraries/archives that AI has finally reached a state of usefulness here

Some more, including open field search. Early literacies illinois.csod.com/ux/ats/caree... Information Behavior/HCI/UX illinois.csod.com/ux/ats/caree... Information Sciences illinois.csod.com/ux/ats/caree...

Our School of Information Sciences is running four searches, and we can hire more than four candidates. Here’s the first link, for a job that might appeal to people working in history of information, history of science, or digital humanities. +

re @adamgurri.liberalcurrents.com on NSF support for the web www.liberalcurrents.com/marc-andrees... -- the NSF specifically gave $3.7M just for Mosaic www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/... and $4.6M for a related effort www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/...

I am discovering several people who have made similar intellectual jumps - I'm guessing that the comparison is nearly irresistible to anyone who has read Parry/Lord and thought at all about LLMs.

I like this piece, though I was primed to do so because I introduced my AI seminar last year by talking about Parry/Lord and oral composition. Oral epic is unfamiliar enough that it makes a better example of a cultural technology than language itself.

Can confirm that Gemini 3 Pro can transcribe Césaire's handwriting like a specialist. I just fed it one of Césaire's most trash handwriting, and the only thing it missed was the name "Suzy." Damn. Even AI is all in to make Suzanne invisible. Lol. Cold.

Interesting about Claude. A few years ago I tried to use Gemini1.5 to OCR a few pages of 19th C texts from the HTDL and got a RECITATION error. Apparently I was asking the model to output "passages that are "recited" from copyrighted material in the foundational LLM's training data."

FWIW, I've been asking Claude to transcribe both printed text and handwriting that it almost certainly hasn't seen (e.g. photos from pretty obscure docs in archives) for a couple of years, and it has gotten massively better this year. Still has difficulty with some stuff (esp. very period-specific

I was wondering this! Namely whether it had already seen the plaintext in training.

Dan's post is great, as usual! It's exciting to move to full-page models that allow us to engage with the text and avoid mucking around with image processing. But we don't need to pronounce a eulogy on paleographers yet. The War Department and Jane Austen examples are likely known to the LM. 1/

Here at UMass Amherst CICS, we’re searching for TT faculty in NLP – see the link from www.cics.umass.edu/about/employ... I’m happy to answer questions of course, too!

Back to EpiDoc: A query to the www.jiscmail.ac.uk/EPIDOC-MARKUP list would surely return pointers to dozens of repos of EpiDoc files with Greek inscriptions. I'd love to see that list!

I believe Inscriptions of the Northern Black Sea also have EpiDoc files available (github.com/kingsdigital...), but I haven't checked how up to date these are. Many EpiDoc projects listed at: wiki.digitalclassicist.org/Category:Epi... . At least some I haven't thought of will have downloadable XML.

EpiDoc: There are repos for I.Aphrodisias (github.com/Aphrodisias/...), IRCyr (github.com/kingsdigital...), IGCyr (doi.org/10.6092/unib...), ICretaInst (github.com/IreneVagiona...) with c. 100s – 1000s of EpiDoc files in each.

A student is working on detecting gaps in text transcriptions. Does anyone in #DigiClass or beyond know of open transcriptions of ancient Greek inscriptions, in EpiDoc or otherwise, similar to papyri.info ? I've worked with literary texts and papyri, but I'm stumped on this.

Que reste-t-il des textes médiévaux ? Pourquoi certains survivent et d’autres s’effacent ? 👉 Une séance de séminaire dédiée aux enjeux de la transmission textuelle dans le cadre du projet ERC LostMA avec @jbcamps.bsky.social Rendez-vous demain à partir de 14h Inscription 🔽

Three exciting opportunities at @msftresearch.bsky.social in NYC!!! 🎉 Internship w/ FATE: apply.careers.microsoft.com/careers/job?... Internship w/ STAC on AI evaluation and measurement: apply.careers.microsoft.com/careers/job?... Postdoc w/ FATE: apply.careers.microsoft.com/careers/job?...